


talking shit about a pretty sunset

by ophelietta



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Gen, M/M, XMFC golden trio hijinx!, why aren't platonic OT3s a thing!?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-15
Updated: 2017-10-17
Packaged: 2017-12-08 13:55:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/762093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophelietta/pseuds/ophelietta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>... Oh god not another high school AU AKA that one where Charles and Emma are wee adorable society brat BFFs and Erik is that awkward, glowering, exchange student that they befriend/adore/adopt as one of their messed up own. </p><p>In other words, Charles and Erik navigate the awkward territory of wanting to bone each other, and Emma navigates the awkward territory of trying to be okay with this. Friendship and loveship are complicated, guys.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Emma's family/backstory partially based off of Higher Learning ([https://marvelunlimited.blogspot.ca/2013/06/emma-frost-2003-all-18-issues.html]()), which has hilariously terrible covers. Title from Modest Mouse.

Emma strolls back into civilian life on a Tuesday. She lingers on the edge of the rugby pitch trying to look like she isn’t waiting for him, a thin gold cigarette perched between scarlet lips, face shielded by her “fuck off” sunglasses. He takes the time to appreciate the view of Emma in lace stockings dragged over her knees and a pale scrap of pleated silk that might generously be called a skirt, an outfit calculated to screw with the tender brains of schoolboys. She looks like a pin up or a demented film goddess or his favourite girl or all three.    
  
He doesn’t remember if he calls her name before he flies across the field, but she braces for the impact in that resigned, familiar way of hers as he smothers in a hug. “Emma darling,” he breathes, his face buried in fistfuls of gold hair. Her hands curl around his neck, not quite grudgingly.  
  
“You’re paying for my dry cleaning,” she informs him. “You’re getting grass stains and mud and your sweat all over my jacket. You're disgusting.”

“I’ve been languishing away without you, too.”

“Liar,” she says, in that reflexive way, without any heat. She’s going for casually bored, but when she lets her sunglasses slide down, he can see the purplish smudges of sheer exhaustion beneath her eyes, and she’s leaning against him a little more heavily than merely missing him can account for.

“Let’s get you to bed.”

“Really, sugar, so soon? Old Lefty not good enough company for you?”

He slings an arm around her waist and picks up her travelling case. “Oh yes, I am intensely aroused by the thought of tucking you into bed.”

“Well, you’re a sick freak that way. So.”

“Gentlemen,” he calls to his team mates who are taking down the goal posts and gathering up stray rugby balls, “if you’ll excuse me from packing up this one time, I’m just going to escort Miss Frost back to her room.”

None of the vets openly leer, because by this point and time, they've been subjected to the unsubtle battering ram of Emma Frost’s rejections, but a few of the rooks gape.

“Take your time, Captain. And welcome back, Miss Frost,” Azazel says dryly, giving Emma an unmistakeable salute. Charles, out of curiousity, had once inquired about the origins of Azazel's healthy respect for Emma. Azazel had thought for a few minutes, and then launched into a fascinating and erudite lecture which incorporated quotations of (non-translated) Russian poetry; at Charles' blank look, Azazel just gave up and said, "She's an ice cold bitch. I respect that. Reminds me of my mother." 

Emma nods at Azazel in an imperious way and they hobble off the pitch like the world’s slowest three legged race. Emma's back is ramrod straight until they get to Charles' room. She collapses on his unmade bed, and he has to wrestle with her a bit to get her jacket off, but her shoes slide off easily. She punches a few of his pillows, buries herself in a cocoon of blankets, and Charles debates with himself for about thirty seconds before he kicks off his cleats and joins her.

“Ditch the jersey. Both its colour and aroma are offensive.”

“I think it's a very charming combination,” Charles protests automatically, mostly because he's been acclimatized to the blue and yellow striped “monstrosity.”

“Honestly, Charles, are you blind? Petition to get rid of the thing and you'll be the most beloved captain in the rugby team's history.”

“Emma dear, they're _school_ _colours_. They will outlive you, and me, and everyone we know.”

But Charles concedes, strips off the jersey and his underarmour, and Emma absentmindedly hands him a crumpled white t-shirt poking out of one of his drawers. When they settle back together, her back is flush against his chest, and their legs tangle together comfortably as he feel his heartbeat slow down to match Emma’s.

Two weeks, he thinks. Two weeks, he thinks, two weeks, fourteen days, three hundred thirty-six hours, and he won’t be trite enough to count the minutes and seconds they've been separated. They'd texted and written and Skyped nearly every day, but it wasn't - couldn't ever be - quite the same.

“How was Christian when you left?” he murmurs.

Emma's silent for a beat, then says, not quite lightly, “He's still alive. So that’s more than anyone expected.”

He presses his lips into her hair, and feels her her sigh and shift. They’re like kittens, like the children they never really got the chance to be, huddling together, whispering secrets. They breathe in, they breathe out. Their bodies sink into the relief of each other’s remembered warmth.

Emma says something, but so quietly that you'd have to be pressed up against her to hear it. It's a good thing that Charles is.

“I missed you too,” he whispers back, and watches the flush creep up Emma’s throat and shoulders. A wave of fondness washes over him. She could be so shy about the oddest things.

A knock at the door, and “Xavier – “

Emma tenses. Charles props himself up on an elbow, catches her eye; she pauses for a fraction of a second, then gives a minute nod. “Come in,” Charles calls to the door, straightening and sitting up in bed.

There’s the slightest pause before Erik Lehnsherr pokes his head in through the door. Charles can detect some kind of movement of Erik’s eyes, hidden as they are behind sturdy, thick-framed spectacles, as they settle on Charles and Emma. Charles feels that curious sensation that arises whenever Erik steps into a room; it's as if his chest is a balloon slowly filling with air, except air of an exhilarated and effervescent kind, the Dom Perignon of oxygen and dear Lord, he's _giddy_. He's giddy and babbling in his brain and there is Erik and there is Emma and _breathe,_ Charles.

“ _Erik_! This is my best friend Emma, I've talked about her loads already. Emma, this is Erik Lehnsherr from 217B next door. He transferred here at the beginning of the term. You remember him, don’t you?” Charles nudges Emma with his shoulder. She glares at him through cat-slitted eyes.

“No, I don’t,” Emma says baldly, because she has always disdained social lies, even though she’s masterful at deploying them. Erik doesn’t even blink. She gives a sigh of long suffering as Charles aims his most patient, pointed Look at her. “Emma Frost,” she grumbles, in Erik’s general direction. “Charmed.”

“I’m sure.” Erik’s voice is a perfect match in dryness. “Xavier, I finished my half of the questions. I’ll just-" 

And he leaves a stack of papers on the top of Charles’ desk, which is scattered with old cups of tea, apple cores, half-open textbooks, cartoon doodles of cells, and most of a two-foot tall model of a DNA helix. Charles knows that all the questions will be precisely, succinctly answered, neatly labelled and lettered, without a single sign eraser smudge or bit of white out. Perfect.

“Thanks very much, Erik. I’ll see you in class tomorrow?”

Erik gives him a weary look. “Tomorrow's Wednesday, isn’t it?”

After the door shuts, Emma gives him quite a different Look.

_“What?”_

“Charles,” Emma asks, “do you have a crush?”

“ _Hardly_ ,” he says, trying to go for an Emma-approved level of dismissiveness, but she grabs his face in her hands so she can work her soul-searching voodoo on him, perfect blue eyes honed like a laser.

“Good God, you _do_. You’re practically glowing with it.”

“I do _not_. How were you able to discern that from a thirty second conversation? I just think Erik is – a fascinating specimen, and that – that the two of you would get along splendidly - " 

“ _Charles._ I don’t get along with _anyone_. Splendidly or otherwise.” The _except you_ goes unspoken.

“I think you would make an exception for Erik,” Charles soldiers on. “You have very similar temperaments – "

Okay, so Emma’s perfectly arched eyebrows shooting up to her hairline might be a little justified.

“If anything, both of you have a talent for giving me the most incredulous looks.”

The thing is, Erik _does_ remind him of Emma, in so many ways. Erik is an exquisite analytical machine, energy and thought perfectly converted to motion, efficient to the point of the sublime, and yet – and yet – he is not _cold_. There’s an engine at his heart’s spring center, a core of warmth hidden under layers of sullen, vibrating tension and sarcastic, guttural German. Charles has never heard Erik laugh, but he’s plotting out a time line for it, and he thinks that when he does manage to coax Erik into laughing, it will be savage and joyful and utterly real.

“Charles, I know you are not blind, so you could not have missed that atrocious turtleneck he was wearing, or those old man glasses from the seventies. He doesn’t even wear them in the ironic hipster way, just in the awkward European immigrant way.”

“His _mother_ made him those sweaters. I think it's rather sweet. And he only needs the glasses for reading, but I find that they make him look quite – “

“Sexy, yes, Charles, we know what a whore you are for nerds.”

“ – _Intellectual_ ,” Charles says, with what remains of his dignity which, honestly, with Emma, is very little.

“ _Charles_.” Emma’s finger taps the side of his face. “Falling for straight boys is – “

“A crime against humanity, I know.” His fingers meet Emma’s. “He’s just my lab partner for AP Bio, and an excellent chess player. That’s all. I promise, love, I won’t do anything tragically stupid.”

“You do stupid things all the time. You adopt kittens. You lead student groups. You wear cardigans. You play rugby. You tutor dumb people. You say ‘good morning’ and mean it...”

He kisses her on the forehead, as if that can smooth away the furrow between her eyes. “Then it’s a good thing you come back to set me on the path of righteousness again.”

“You’re damn right it’s a good thing.” Her eyelids are closing, and he wonders how many people have had the privilege of seeing Emma Frost like this, hair a mess and lipstick smudged and sharp-edged words unspooling into sleepiness. Not enough, not nearly enough. “You’d be lost without me, sugar. Utterly lost.”

~

Emma wakes up at six in the morning after fifteen hours of sleep, feeling… not _refreshed_ , but – “comforted” might be the right word. By the familiar angle of the splash of sunlight against the wall, the colourful rows of non-compulsory scientific reading (good God, who reads about evolutionary biology and computational theory of mind for _fun_? If they weren’t friends, she would have to make Charles’ life miserable, or more miserable, or _something_ ); rugby posters of the school team, the Great Britain Lions, and the New Zealand All Blacks; the framed portrait of a benign, beaming Albert Einstein whimsically topped, by Emma, with a sticker of a  rhinestone tiara; and most of all, by the warm, steady weight of Charles pressing against her side, soft puffs of breath against her collarbone, her cheek. His face is blue-shadowed and stubbly in the morning, and she loves him for this, for all of the rough edges that no one else gets to see.

At some point, he had roused himself and done useful things, she assumed, but honestly, she’d been blacked out for most of it, roused only when Charles crawled back into bed somewhere around two or three in the morning.

Two weeks by Christian’s bedside in the hospital and also in Snow Valley, that’s how much of her life had passed by, in a spate of both ignoring and being ignored by her father, driven half-mad by her older Adrienne‘s shameless brown nosing, Mother’s confused, copious weeping and discreet pill popping, her younger sister Cordelia’s harried text messages which came frequently, despite Cordelia claiming that she refused to rush home every time Christian pulled one of his “stunts” and then asking, over and over again, if anyone was saying anything about her absence. Only Charles’ e-mails and timely texts and daily half hour Skype calls kept her sanity on a sort of even keel. Inevitably, trapped in her childhood home without the soothing presence of Charles, her insomnia had returned, and so she’d found herself pacing around her old room of pastels walls and deep carpets and finely aged oak furniture, feeling an urge to tear the dresses off of dolls and set lacy pillows on fire and get very, very drunk and barge in on the middle of her father’s conference calls with his business partners while wearing nothing but a slip.

Six a.m. Still enough time to go to her own room – where she spent very little time, to be honest – for the routine of shower, change, hair, and make up. There would even be time to ingest a fuckload of caffeine, even as Charles gave her doe eyes over his breakfast platter and delivered a well-meaning lecture on essential nutrients.

Emma pulls her jacket on over one of the endless supply of white men’s t-shirts that she’s forever stealing from Charles, shimmies into her skirt, pulls back her hair in a loose knot, and drops a kiss on Charles’ forehead.

“Morning, love.” His voice is hoarse and sweet the way it always is in the morning. “Don’t forget,” he says drowsily, “your notes are in that blue folder, on top of the desk.”

The blue folder rests precariously on top of a stack of molecular physics textbooks; as much as it looks like the contents of Charles’ room regularly explode, his notes for her missed school work are fastidious and tidy. Charles is one of those delightfully contradictory human beings who is neat and put together in his personal appearance, but, beneath his veneer of well-buttoned cardigans, is actually a total and utter slob.

“I knew there was a reason I loved you.”

“There are many,” he protests, before burrowing back beneath the covers. She knows that he will show up precisely five minutes before breakfast stops being served, and charm all the servers into giving him double helpings of everything. The brat.

She opens the door to the washroom, thinking to splash some cold water on her face just to get her awake enough to drag her luggage and things back to her room, and she is faced with a very surprised Erik Lehnsherr, opening up the door on _his_ side of his and Charles’ shared bathroom. He looks quite different from the turtleneck-choked, bespectacled nerd fairly exuding a grim aura of “I loathe all beings on this planet."

Instead, he’s in shorts and a faded t-shirt that does great things for his shoulders, and has his sweaty hair pushed back from his forehead. Without the glasses, he actually has a face, which, she admits in a grudging way, is not the most tragically unattractive face she has ever seen. It is probably for the best that Charles sleeps in as long as possible in the morning and has missed this probably boner-inducing sight.

Charles has crushes all the time – on student teachers, tech guys, visitors from other schools, juniors and seniors in his upper level classes, boys he meets at science camps and chess competitions and rugby matches. These crushes are harmless things, fluttering, colourful, brief. They add a bit of excitement to Charles’ life, but they remain at a safe distance, more fantasy than anything else. They can do him no harm and make for excellent masturbatory material.

But Erik is here, next door, in AP Bio three times a week, and chess matches whenever. And Charles has a habit of not knowing where to draw boundaries. Emma loves him for it and despairs over it, often in the same breath.

“Morning, Lehnsherr,” she says. If he registers any surprise at her presence, he does a good job of suppressing it, merely blinking at her coolly.

“Morning, Frost.”

“Emma darling,” she hears a plaintive voice call from bed, “did you steal my shirt again?”

“You have a million like it,” she says, not moving her gaze from Lehnsherr’s.

“I was _wearing_ that one.”

“You can have it back afterwards,” and she maneuvers herself against the sink, splashing her face and throat with cold water in slow, luxurious motions, feeling Lehnsherr’s eyes on her back.

“Are you being an awful brat and hogging the washroom?” Charles calls from the bed. “Get out of there, Emma. And good morning, Erik.”

She steps away from the sink. “It’s all yours, Lehnsherr,” she says, her voice glittering with a subtle warning that may or may not go undetected.

“Good morning, Xavier,” Lehnsherr says, moving smoothly past Emma as if she isn't even there.

She doesn’t bite down on a nail (French manicure, not worth the ruin), but she feels, for no reason whatsoever, like tripping Erik Lehnsherr or pulling his hair or locking him in his own washroom or – or something. For some reason, she doesn’t want to look at Charles’ face when she comes back into his room, and instead just mutters out of the side of her mouth, “I'm going back to my room to get less disgusting. Meet you in the dining hall for breakfast.”

“Will you _eat_ breakfast?”

“No.”

Even when she’s not looking at him, she can _feel_ his face fall.

“Maybe,” she amends, and then wonders, as Charles beams at her, when she became so _tame_.

~

It turns out that Lehnsherr doesn’t eat breakfast, either.

Emma nurses a cup of coffee – black, black, with a spoonful of sugar – feeling much more composed now that she is freshly showered and clothed, hair curled and make up perfect. She chalks up her imperfect encounter with Lehnsherr in the morning as a failure to arm herself adequately for battle and know that next time, things will be better.

Then Erik and Charles come down to breakfast together.

Charles looks as he usually does in the morning, harried but cheerful in a mis-buttoned cardigan, his hair perpetually rumpled, one hand gesticulating wildly as he tells a story that Erik Lehnsherr – again in the turtleneck, again in the glasses – does not appear to be listening to, his face stony and bored. But he doesn’t seem to be telling Charles to shut up, either.

She feigns total non-surprise as Lehnsherr joins her and Charles at their usual table.

“Really?” Charles asks through a mouthful of hash browns, eyeing the both of them as they sip coffee in mutual silence. “ _Neither_ of you are hungry?”

“You know it often nauseates me – “ “It’s difficult to concentrate on a full stomach – “ Lehnsherr and Emma say, almost at the exact same time. She glares at him. He gives her a grating stare in return.

“But it’s – “

“If you say _the most important meal in the day,_ I will stab you with your own fork. Really I will,” Emma says, as lightly as if she’s commenting on the weather.

“ _Delicious_ ,” squirrel-cheeked Charles says. Charles’ plate is heaped high with various breakfast foods, many of the bacon variety, and the entire thing is drenched in maple syrup. She feels a vague moment of solidarity with Lehnsherr as he looks as ill as she feels.

“I _knew_ you and Erik were secretly the same person,” Charles mutters. A muscle in Lehnsherr’s face twitches – fascinating!

Emma finds herself saying, “I think I could choke down something after all,” and she snags a piece of whole wheat toast off of a corner of Charles’ plate that hasn’t yet drowned in the sea of syrup. The toast tastes like cardboard. She puts a dollop of strawberry jam on it and it tastes like cardboard with strawberry jam on it, and also a bit like victory. She doesn’t do anything so crass as send a smirk in Lehnsherr’s direction, though.

“Doesn’t that make you feel better now?” Charles asks, blithely and idiotically like the blithe idiot he is.

God damn it. _Tamed_.

~

Erik is keeping a list in his mind of Maddening Things That Charles Xavier Does. This mental list is ever-growing, and includes a few of the folllowing items:

  * 11: Being appallingly, frighteningly intelligent, and therefore the only student the school who is worthy of being Erik's academic rival.

  * 12: Also being one of the most _annoyingly_ cheerful and/or sociable human beings at the school and _insisting_ on carrying on conversations with Erik as if they are quote "getting on pretty well as friends, don't you think?" end quote.



  * 52: Pinning up, over his desk, the circuit diagrams that Erik drew for him in AP Physics. Erik congratulated Charles for keeping the diagrams, because they were much more useful than the ones in the textbook, but the sight of Erik's diagrams mixed in with Charles' other things caused a strange constriction in Erik's throat that Erik did not need to examine too closely to conclude that (1) he didn't like it and (2) it was probably Charles' fault.

  * 61: greeting, _by name_ , every single student and staff member that he passes in the hallway, right down to the guy who empties out their trash cans. (“Come now, Erik,” Charles had laughed at him, just a few days ago. “His name is Manny and he’s always singing Motown. Last week it was 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone.' Don’t you remember?”)

  * 77: Mentioning his mysterious, absent best friend Emma Frost _all the time_. (“She's had a bit of a family emergency, but she'll be back soon. I can't wait for you to meet her!” “Emma’s just brilliant, I wouldn’t have passed Art History without her – “ “And over there are the stables, where Emma almost gave the master of stables a heart attack by jumping a half-broken colt over a fence – “ “Emma’s quite good at chess too, although she gets bored rather easily – “ “I really, really, REALLY can’t wait for you to meet Emma! I think the two of will get along _splendidly_!”)

  * 78: Failing to mention that Emma Frost is, objectively speaking, one of the most ruthlessly beautiful human beings that Erik has ever had the misfortune to meet, especially when she is in Charles' bed, and wrapped around him like a very blonde boa constrictor.




Right now, Charles is on

  * 79: Dragging his shirt cuffs through maple syrup and beaming at Erik expectantly while Emma Frost (he does not get a strange punched feeling in his gut whenever he thinks of her, he does _not_ , INEXCUSABLE) glares at him like a well-groomed and irritated cat.




“What do you say, Erik?” Charles asks. “I've been gathering up Emma's notes and assignments for the past two weeks, but we should really have a thorough study session to go over things since we have a free study period right after breakfast, and you've a much better head for languages and history than I, and I'm sure Emma would be very happy to return the favour if _you_ end up missing classes for some unfortunate reason, so what do you think?”

 _Coffee_ , Erik thinks nonsensically. _This is just Charles on_ tea _. I shudder to see him on coffee_.

With all the intellect of his seventeen years on Earth, Erik says, “What?” at the same time that Emma Frost says, “Unnecessary,” again, in a flat tone that eerily reminds Erik of himself, except that Emma Frost definitely sounds more dead inside.

Charles waves his arms around, obviously one of the compliance techniques that he learned from the debate team. “Studying! With me and Emma (yes, Emma, it is 'me and Emma,' not 'Emma and I,' don't make that face)! For catch up! Mmm, maple syrup,” and Charles Fucking Xavier _licks_ at a droplet of maple syrup running down the side of his wrist and it is definitely not distracting. At all.

“Disgusting,” Emma Frost says, sounding deeply bored by the universe and everything it contains.

“It's a crime to waste good maple syrup,” Charles lectures, and then he turns and says, “What do you say, Erik?”

_In all nine circles of hell, no -_

“Yes,” Erik's stupid, traitorous mouth says, causing Charles to beam at him. Erik broods, for the nth time, about the lack of proper nemeses to crush and destroy and generally just grind into dust and non-existence. 

“Fantastic! To the library!” Charles says with the kind of unironic enthusiasm for knowledge that makes Erik want to set himself on fire and that is simultaneously, humiliatingly, bafflingly arousing.

Emma Frost chooses, at that moment, to give Erik a contemplative look. He does not flip over the table. He does not give her the finger. He drinks his coffee, and pointedly does not watch Charles out of the corner of his eyes, the way he never does. 


	2. Chapter 2

****Erik doesn't know how it begins.

 

(He knows precisely how it begins).

 

He first meets Charles Xavier at the office once he's done filling out the last of his intake forms. Xavier is exactly the kind of earnest, well-meaning, horribly privileged, disgustingly enthusiastic and stupidly over-friendly representative of student government that deserves to be punched hard and often, preferably right in the center of his cherubic face. He’s in his school uniform already, grey dress pants and a white shirt and a hideous navy blue cardigan with thin yellow stripes at the cuffs. His navy tie is in a sloppy knot, and it’s stained with tea. 

 

And the very first annoying thing Xavier that does is beam at Erik, as if Erik has just saved a litter of puppies from being eaten by sharks. 

 

“Erik Lehnsherr _,_ what a _pleasure_ to meet you! I’m Charles Xavier, and I’ll be showing you around the school. Welcome to our fair temple of learning!” 

 

And then, like he's seventy years old, he _shakes_ Erik's hand, a good firm handshake and full on eye-contact. What. The. Fuck. 

 

Xavier shows him around the school (he waxes rhapsodic about the labs for so long that Erik considers sticking his hand into the open flame of a Bunsen burner), while Erik just tries not to vomit over how much money the school has. It's not like it's ostentatious or gaudily luxurious, there's no marble columns or fountains with naked cupids in them. Thank the gods. 

 

It’s just that everything is in quiet, classical good taste – dark hardwood furniture, polished floors, neatly maintained grounds. Row of wide screen Macs in the computer lab, a fucking robotics lab, common rooms that have more square footage than the apartment he shares with his mom, a dining hall. A _dining hall_. Not a cafeteria in a basement, like Erik’s old school. But _a fucking dining hall like in Harry Potter_. The only place that soothes him is the library which is, yes, also grandiose but at least filled with books who have the comforting tendency to never talk. 

 

Erik runs his mind over the dollar amount of the generous scholarship for this exchange program and tries to feel grateful, instead of feeling like he wants to piss on the rugs and torch the place. 

 

Xavier, meanwhile, keeps up that steady stream of bright chatter about meal times and uniforms and teachers and classes and social events. He manages this despite the fact that Erik has only replied with a few grunts and monosyllabic replies. 

 

 As huge as the grounds are, the tour seems to take twice as long as is strictly necessary, because Xavier seems to know everybody – fucking _everybody_ – and of course he has to stop to talk to every. Single. One. Of them. Oh, and introduce Erik because, of _course_ , the one thing that Erik wanted most of all was to be highly visible in his new school, where he was going to be visible anyway, being aggressively middle class, a German exchange student, and definitely _not_ the son of a film star or a politician or a diplomat or an oil baron. This is going to be just great. 

 

Xavier finally, mercifully, drops him off at his room, although, of course, because the gods exist and they love to fuck with Erik, Xavier is right next door and they have to share a bathroom. Fucking great. If Xavier sings in the morning while tiny birds help him to dress, Erik cannot guarantee that no homicides by the end of the first month. 

 

Erik lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling. The room is, at least, not horribly pretentious. In fact, it’s quite plain. He has a bed and a desk and a dresser and a closet, bare and quite non-threatening, but it’s not _home_. His legs feel unsteady, as if he’s rolling on a deck, unmoored. His mind is drowning with everything that he’s seen today, all the new information he’s going to have to absorb, feeling so far away from everything that he knows. The full weight of everything he’s decided to do - leaving home, leaving Mama, leaving school for a year, travelling to a new country - slams into him, leaves him gut-punched, choking, grinding his palm into his eyes. 

 

He’s two seconds away from calling Magda, and just blurting out, _I fucked up. I can’t do this_ , when there’s a gentle knock at his door. 

 

Unfortunately, because Erik has been socialized by his mother instead of the wolves that are clearly his actual kin, he doesn’t instantly say, _Fuck off_ , but, “Come in.”

 

And it’s god damn over-sharing, overzealous Charles “The F is for Francis - excruciating, I know” Xavier. 

 

“Oh! Sorry, I didn’t realize you were napping.” 

 

Erik drags himself up, scrubs at his face “It’s fine,” he says gruffly. “What do you want?”

 

“I just thought-” Xavier’s face is hopeful. “You don’t happen to like Ritter Sport, do you? I love sweets, but I’m not really much for marzipan-” and he’s handing out a square of something, a chocolate bar in a familiar red wrapper. 

 

Erik watches himself reach out for it, as though underwater. “Thank you,” he says, slowly, flashing back to his fourth grade field trip to Ritter Sport’s ChocoWorld in the wintertime, Magda’s pink-mittened hand excitedly clutching his as attendant made her a chocolate with bits of raspberry and tiny golden stars.  

 

“No, thank you for taking it off my hands!” Xavier says, so cheerful. “And please remember, do feel free to knock on my door if you need anything.”

 

Erik nods, his hands feeling large and clumsy around his favourite chocolate bar. He vows to never knock on Xavier’s door. 

 

~

 

The next day, Erik makes sure his “fuck off” signals are being broadcast loud and clear by bringing his new Physics textbook to breakfast and ignoring all eye contact as he digs into his oatmeal. He's engrossed in skimming the table of contents when an irritatingly familiar voice asks, “Mind if I sit here?” 

 

And before Erik can say “No, no, _seven hells no,_ ” Xavier is sitting across from him, plunking down a big mug of tea and a plate full of waffles that is basically suffocated by whipping cream and strawberries. Erik is just about to inform Xavier that he does not like small talk, he does not like people, he does not like breakfast, he does not like _any activity that involves all of the above_ , but Xavier is propping up his own book, which (1) is not the standard high school Bio textbook (2) has a brightly coloured tropical fish on the cover and a magenta stripe on the bottom (3) and which is called _Evolution_ ’ _s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People_. 

 

Xavier's not even looking at Erik anymore; he's drinking tea and turning to a section of the book that he's marked with a – a _goddamn_ _Winnie the Pooh bookmark_. It has a tiny gold tassel with a honey pot charm at the end. 

 

Erik realises he's gaping and snaps his mouth shut, but he can't stop watching Xavier cut up his waffles without even looking at them, shoving food into his mouth and making little “hmms” and other noises as he reads. At some point, maybe five or fifty minutes later, he looks up at Erik and gives him a dreamy, surprised smile, the smile one gives upon swimming up to the surface after being absorbed in a book. 

 

“Hello!” Xavier says. 

 

“What - ” _What_ are _you?_ is what Erik wants to ask. _How do you exist?_

 

“What am I reading?” Charles asks. “This AMAZING book, all about sexual diversity in different animal species and how Charles Darwin was, bless him, right about some things, and completely, absolutely, horribly wrong about others. How about you, what are you reading?” 

 

“...” Erik says. 

 

Years later, he'll reluctantly pinpoint this as the day they became friends. 

 

~ 

 

Two weeks later, Erik spots Emma Frost on the third floor of the library, sitting at a table by the window with her notebooks and textbooks placed in neat piles. Seeing her profile, he's struck all over again by how unforgivingly beautiful she is, her profile so sharp and classical that it looks like it should be stamped onto an ancient coin. 

 

Her notebooks are all white hardcover Moleskines and he wonders  where this particular neurosis came from; at the same time, it's hardly the weirdest compulsion he's seen at boarding school so far. She's looking at the window, distracted. 

 

He takes a step towards her and her gaze snaps towards him, going from abstract to aggressive like the crack of a whip. Because he is reckless and lives to get a rise out of people like her, he takes one, large deliberate step closer to the table, though her expression and her body language all channel a single thought: _Go away_.

 

She doesn't say anything. Erik doesn't either. 

 

“Erik! Emma!”

 

Erik is positive that Emma Frost is the one to break eye contact first, the tension in her shoulders lessening as she turns to Charles, loaded down with books and his stupid Academy of Saint Sebastian mug in one hand. His hair is flying away from his forehead, his cheeks are flushed, and there’s a pile of books tottering in his arms. Erik catches one before it falls and Emma glares daggers at him, her hand half a beat too slow. He tries not to bask in the feeling of having scored points. 

 

Charles smiles at him, says, “Thank you for helping me deal with this absurd pile – I have never learned to take out just one book at a time,” and Erik says, stiffly, “That is ridiculous,” instead of _That is adorable_. 

 

Then Charles turns from Erik, says, “Hello darling,” and swoops in on Emma and leaves a half-kiss on her cheek, and Erik expects it to burn and glow, to burn and glow, the place on Emma's skin that Charles' lips have touched, but she remains pale and fair and unfairly perfect, a blonde snow queen.

 

“We should get started,” Erik barks out, and Charles just says equably, “Yes, let's. Emma darling, what do you need to catch up on?” 

 

~  

 

Emma knows precisely how it begins. 

 

She's eleven years old, and they're all sitting at the long dining room table. This time, the guests are Sharon Xavier, an old friend of her mother's from college, and her son and her second husband and her stepson. She knows, because of the pre-visit family briefing in the dining room, that Father is courting Sharon's husband, Dr. Kurt Marko, about some hush-hush military contracts that Father wants in on. Emma and her sisters are coldly informed that they are all to be on their best behaviour – Adrienne is ordered to wear something that exposes less cleavage, Emma to smile, Cordelia to be... Well, not herself. 

 

The Xavier-Markos are nothing extraordinary. Sharon Xavier has salon-set curls and long red nails, and spends her days chatting poolside with her mother, drinking endless tumblers of gin and tonics and vodka lemonade to “stave off the heat.” Sharon is basically the British version of Emma's own mother, numbing herself with liquor instead of candy-coloured pills. Boring. 

 

Dr. Kurt Marko tries to be casual surrounded by the wealth of the Frost family estate. His compliments about the house itself seem off the cuff, understated, but she senses something forced and - _researched_ \- in his comments about wine vintages and the Hamptons. He’s not bad-looking, tall and dark-haired with a moustache and a trim goatee that make him look like an old film star, but he moves awkwardly in his fine clothes, as if they’re still a costume. _Gauche_ , she hears, in her mother’s precise tones, in the back of her head.   

 

Marko's son Cain is repellant – a hulking thirteen-year-old who stares at Adrienne unabashedly and follows her around, especially when she sunbathes. Adrienne pretends to be dismissive but obviously enjoys the attention; at this dinner, she wears a tight, sleeveless dark magenta silk top with a Mandarin collar. This garment technically covers her cleavage. 

 

And then there's Sharon's son, Charles. He and Emma are the same age, so they are thrown together and expected to become the best of friends, future spouses, little boy holding little girls's hand, etc, etc, but so far, two days into this visit, she's largely ignored him. He is soft-spoken and brown-haired and curls into himself, his shoulders hunched together like a bird's. He's soft all over and far too sweet, like milky tea, and spends most of his days hiding in the library. 

 

If you are a Frost, you learn to hide your weaknesses, to keep your eyes open, to armour up at all times. Charles would be eaten alive if he was a Frost – but he's not. As much as Emma despises him, she envies him for this too. 

 

At eleven going on twelve, Emma, is awkward, bony, flat-chested, her hair a mousy brown that hasn’t lightened to blonde, her face sharp and severe. Her best quality is that she knows how to observe people and learn their weaknesses, to be one of those on whom nothing is lost. She looks nothing like Adrienne, who at fifteen is golden as Brigitte Bardot and perfectly filled out, or Cordelia with her black, bushy pigtails, who seems to spend much of her time tearing through the house, screaming and tattle-taling about the nanny's love affairs. 

 

Her brother Christian, the lucky jerk, is missing dinner, claiming he has to work long hours at the summer internship which Father set him up with at one of the half-dozen tech companies that fall under the umbrella of the family holdings. Privately, Emma knows that he is sleeping with one of the managers: older, married, male. She hopes he's being careful, wherever he is. Emma would rather die than sell out Christian, and Cordelia at least hasn't learned the game yet, but Adrienne has no scruples at betrayal, if it means getting a single iota of Father's attention and approval. 

 

At the moment, they are in the throes of the excruciatingly exciting conversation topic of _school_ , and Dr. Kurt Marko is bragging about how well Charles is doing right now, how he just won gold at an international science fair in Australia. Something to do with Charles working in a lab, a professor offering to mentor him, a breakthrough in treatment for some rare blood disease, blah blah blah. Charles, oddly, seems to be shrinking into himself at the praise instead of puffing up with it. 

 

“Cain, however,” Dr. Marko says forebodingly. Emma recognises this tone with a honing instinct born of years of nervously giving report cards to Winston, who verbally shreds everything that is not an A+, because A+ is the only grade that is acceptable for a Frost to receive. “Cain does not seem to be applying himself to the full of his potential.”

 

Cain has nothing to say to that but he gives a fingerling potato on his plate a particularly savage stab, the look on his face as mulish and resentful as Cordelia's when she was punished for melting Barbie heads in the microwave. 

 

“Hopefully some of Charles' hard work and intelligence will rub off on him,” Dr. Marko says, sounding unbelievably pompous. Cain glowers. Charles sinks into his chair a little more. 

 

“Yes,” Winston says. “I hope the same for Adrienne and Emma. Adrienne's progress is satisfactory, but Emma's grades... less so. It appears that even private school and endless rounds of tutoring cannot compensate for mediocrity.” 

 

Adrienne shoots her a triumphant look and simpers at Father, and Emma concentrates on her plate, her eyes travelling all round the thin gold rim of it, to stave off the stinging in her eyes and the hot wash of what she will, years later, identify as shame. She wills herself to develop laser vision, to slice the table in half. 

 

After dinner, Emma prowls around the house, practicing how silent she can be, how much she can learn about people without their catching on. She's stalking through the library when she hears the low sounds of a threat, a soft cry. She peeks around a book shelf and sees Cain, twisting his step-brother's arm behind his back. Charles' knees are half-buckling, and his face is screwed up, pinched, an awful contrast of red and white. 

 

His face is wet with tears, but he's not crying out loud. He's silent, his whole body shaking with it, and she knows from experience how great a will that takes, to not cry aloud when you’re in that much pain, like swallowing an earthquake. Cain twists Charles' arm harder, forcing his knees onto the carpeted floor. 

 

“Why do you always have to do that?” Cain snarls, mutters. “Always showing off with your stupid medals and awards, how do you think Father would look at you if he knew what you were, you little faggot-”

 

And Charles says, his voice high and breaking, catching a little on his tears, “I'm sorry, Cain.” 

 

“Good!” And Cain lets him go, sprawling, but Charles knocks into a table, and one of Father’s antique globes teeters. Cain catches it, swears, and puts it back, but that makes him nervous enough that he lumbers off, surprisingly quickly for someone of his girth. 

 

Charles doesn’t get up. He lies there, cheek down on the carpet, breathing, just breathing with his eyes shut. 

 

And Emma _despises_ him. 

 

She despise the weakness that he wears so openly, so obviously. It’s like he’s _asking_ for Cain to hurt him. 

 

Then Charles opens his eyes, and sees her. His eyes are a light and startling blue, and they go right through Emma. 

 

Charles holds her gaze as he slowly brings himself to his feet. His posture is different from before – his gaze is focused and present, his chin high, his shoulders even. He seems taller and older than that shy, mumbling boy who keeps his eye on his feet or on his plate when anyone addresses him, who is swallowed up by the plush chairs in his library and plays chess by himself. 

 

“I assume you will keep this to yourself, as you do everything you see,” he says, and even his accent seems sharper. This startles Emma into taking a step back; he notes this, and takes a step forward. “Oh yes, you're not the only one who has learned to step lightly. And yet you're not like either of your sisters – you're no carry tale. Whatever secrets you stumble upon, you keep.” 

 

“You're obviously much cleverer than you seem.” Emma's own voice grows sharp in response. Even though Charles is the one who has been hurt and humiliated, _she's_ the one who feels vulnerable all over at being caught. “Why aren't you clever enough to stop Cain from hurting you? Tell somebody?” 

 

“I told my Mother. That didn’t go well. I told Kurt.” A long pause. “That didn’t go well either.” 

 

He looks older than eleven. He looks as old as Emma feels, sometimes. 

 

“I could help.” The words come out of Emma's mouth before her brain fully processes them. “While you're here, I mean – I could make sure you're not left alone with - him. Cain. In exchange for... keeping my parents off my back. They won't bother me if they see we're,” she bites down on the next word, “ _playing_ together.”  

 

Charles' face softens a little, and he looks a bit more like that shy boy she first despised – maybe that part isn't just a facade, after all.

 

“I would like that,” he says. “A fair and equitable exchange.” And then, in an absurd gesture, he holds out his hand and says, “Hello. I'm Charles Xavier.” 

 

“I know who you are, stupid.”

 

“I know. I just felt like we should have a do-over.” His hand remains steady, palm open. 

 

She takes his hand gingerly, shakes it. His grip is sure and  comforting. “Hello. I'm Emma Frost.”  

 

~ 

 

Lehnsherr meets her gaze and doesn't break eye contact, like a shark slowly eyeing another shark.  That brazen motherfucker pulls up a chair and starts unloading his canvas knapsack as if this table is a place that he could belong. 

 

The problem is that when Charles sees them both and smiles at Lehnsherr like that, Charles _makes_ it a place that Lehnsherr could belong.

 

Another problem is that Lehnsherr's grudgingly helpful. Lehnsherr speaks French without a trace of an accent and knows a frightening amount of world history and apparently inhales Physics textbooks for breakfast, and though his explanations are terse, they include all the essential points. Obviously, Lehnsherr _earned_ his scholarship. Perhaps even through his native intelligence, and not by gouging out another student's eyes and stealing his identity, which had been one of Emma's pet theories. 

 

Charles smiles at Lehnsherr and touches his forearm entirely too much, but she doesn't know what Lehnsherr's deal is – if he's into girls or into guys or into both or maybe into nothing at all. He doesn't tell seem to encourage Charles into beaming at him whenever he makes a quote “brilliant point, Erik,” unquote  but he doesn't _not_ encourage it either. Anyone who can resist Charles on a learning high must be made of tough stuff, because Charles is pretty much an epic fangirl whose OTP is Teaching/Your Brain. 

 

Charles makes some noise about finding a particularly arcane tome and shoots her a Significant Look while Erik is busy with his own homework, graphing equations. That Look so clearly says, _Do try to get along and not kill each other, hmm?_ Sometimes being able to practically read each other's minds is such a bitch. 

 

So Emma sighs internally, and wishes for a cigarette. Charles has been nagging her to quit for ages. 

 

And she says, “Lehnsherr.” 

 

He doesn't even look up from his calculator. “What.” 

 

“I don't like you.” 

 

 _That_ makes him look up. 

 

“I may never like you, actually. But Charles seems to think that you are a decent human being, and for whatever deluded reasons, he _enjoys_ ,” she draws out the word distastefully, “spending time with you. Which means that I may, in the future, have to spend time with you. Unwillingly. So you should know at least one thing.” 

 

She leans forward, and lets her face sink into the blank, terrifying mask that once made Christian break into a sweat when she tested it on him. He swore that her eyes turned black. “If you cause any harm to Charles Xavier, I will end you. That is all.”

 

He leans back in his chair, looking utterly impressed. “You can't weigh more than a hundred pounds. What can do you do to me?”

 

She smiles in a way that makes her mouth curves up but the rest of her face remain chilly and dead and blank. All those hours practicing in front of the mirror have really paid off. “I have too much money, no scruples, and I am 'particularly gifted with a scalpel,' as my biology teacher likes to tell me. What do you _think_ I'll do to you?”

 

He doesn't say _Touche_ , but he might as well, because his face resolves into its own grim, neutral mask. 

 

“Xavier means nothing to me,” he says, the comment too bitten off to be casual, and that one almost makes Emma smile for real. One day, she thinks, when he's older, he could learn to be better at that, at sounding like he doesn't care, at being cool and unaffected, at gliding through the world like a razor. Right now, though, he's horrible at it – all of his rough edges show.   

 

“Stick to chess,” she says. “You'd be terrible at poker.”

 

~ 

 

When Charles comes back with his book, Erik is savagely ripping off pages from his pad of graphing paper, and Emma looks entirely too pleased with herself.

 

He sighs.  Good Lord. This adjustment period will just take longer than he thought. 

 

~

 

The adjustment period takes much, much shorter than Charles thought.  

 

Erik knows, intellectually, that Charles has rugby practice three times a week. 

 

Erik also knows, more than intellectually, in his chest and in his gut,  that rugby practice involves Charles happily collecting bruises and mud on his face, glowing with exertion and sweat, laughing with his team mates in his ugly-ass blue and yellow jersey, looking like an illustration from a children’s schoolbook from the 1960s, looking like a good old boy, looking like everything that things Erik doesn’t want to want.  

 

Erik also, also knows that all the tackling and running after balls and general sweatiness seems like a prelude to an orgy. 

 

He has a good view of the field from his dorm window and it's important to take a five-minute break for every twenty-five minutes of hard work, which Erik does like clockwork, getting up to stretch and casually drifting by the window where Charles is shouting at the new recruits, “the rooks." 

 

Later that week, they're on their way to Bio and Charles is trying to explain the rules to rugby, which sound utterly insane – short shorts; no helmets, padding, or jock straps; they throw the ball sideways; and the names of the positions are all absurd. Charles stops himself halfway through and says, “What am I saying? It all makes much more sense when you see it. You'll come to our first game, won't you? Next week Tuesday after school?”

 

Erik cuts a glance across to Emma, hoping that she'll reject it so he can follow suit but instead she says, “Okay,” not looking up from her cell phone where she’s checking real time stock market quotes. 

 

“Erik?” And Charles looks so damn _hopeful_ and - 

 

Erik shrugs. “Whatever. I’m not doing anything that day,” and mentally cancels the time he had set aside on his calendar to look over his King Lear paper before he hands it in. 

 

Charles smiles beatifically and says, “We can look over your English essay on Tuesday morning during free period.” 

 

And god _dammit_ , he makes it so hard for Erik to not drop everything for Charles, sit at every one of his practices and learn about each stupid nonsensical rule of rugby, if Charles could just keep smiling at him, just like that. 

 

“Who're you playing?” Emma asks, still not looking up from her phone. 

 

“St. Paul's,” Charles says, and Emma stops dead, and looks at him. She says something, not out loud, but with her eyes, with a minute twitch of muscles in her face, and then Emma and Charles are suddenly in the middle of one of those moments where they share a brain and Erik feels a sharp twist of something in his gut that is certainly not jealousy. 

 

Then Emma says, “Cain?”

 

And Charles says, “Cain.” 

 

“All right then.” Emma glues her gaze back on her phone. She doesn't say another word for the rest of the conversation, but when they drop her off at Western Civ, she reaches out with one hand and squeezes Charles' hand, briefly. That one gesture contains whole novels' worth of meaning, in Emma terms. Or so Erik is learning. 

 

“Who's Cain?” Erik asks, no bullshit, as soon as Emma's gone. 

  
“No one.” Charles grimaces. “My stepbrother. No love lost. Don't – don't worry about it.”

 

“I won't,” Erik says, and he doesn't know how to parse the look on Charles' face after that. And even when Charles is quiet throughout their starfish dissection instead of babbling about how _fascinating_ their organs are, Erik tells himself that it probably has nothing to do with him. It’s not like Charles could really care about Erik’s opinion, after all. 

 

~

 

The day of the game, Erik and Emma huddle on the benches lining the field. The sky is a hard, bright blue, the clouds just a few apologetic wisps, and it's unseasonably windy for early October. Erik is in an old brown leather jacket he's had for ages, a knitted green-blue scarf from his mother wrapped around his throat. Emma looks cool and detached in a white coat and cap and sunglasses that cover half her face. Despite Charles’ pleading eyes, neither of them could be fucked to wear school colours to the game, Emma because it clashes with her preferred wardrobe and Erik because… no. 

 

Charles is with the rest of the rugby team, all dressed in their blue and yellow jerseys, and for once, they're not laughing and calling insults to each other, as he's seen them do during practice. They're grim-faced as they warm up, stretching and checking gear, a few of them with a hard gleam in their eye. There's a redheaded kid sitting and stretching, and when he unbends, Erik is startled to see that it's Hank McCoy, his face naked without his glasses. Also, he looks fucking ridiculous in a grey scrum cap. 

 

“Why's McCoy playing rugby?” he asks. “Doesn't this game kill people?” 

 

Emma's mouth curls into a quarter-smile. “I know he normally looks like a strong breeze would knock him over, but you'll see. There's a reason they call him Beast.” 

 

The first week of classes, Hank McCoy had showed Erik how to use the software for his French language lab. Charles had passed by and waved hello at Erik, flashing him a brief, wicked grin, before his face smoothed into something politer and blandly cheerful when he saw McCoy. 

 

“Are you friends with him?” McCoy had asked, hushed. 

 

“Not really, no. He showed me around the first day.” 

 

Hank looked like he was going to throw up onto his shoes. He said, pushing up his glasses, “Xavier and Frost – Frost and Xavier – no matter what the teachers say, they run the school.” 

 

Perhaps she and Charles _do_ run the entire school. When McCoy had told him that, Erik had immediately filed it under “bullshit,” just the kind of thing that people said about blue blood power couples, but now he knows them better. He knows they disappear for terrifyingly clandestine Student Council mornings that seem to go until four in the morning, from which Charles often emerges rumpled and triumphant and a little manic, and which Emma simply refers to as “dull.”

 

Charles once said, regretfully, “I'm so sorry, Erik, I wish I could tell you more about these meetings, but the first rule of Student Council is that I'm not supposed to talk about it.” 

 

“And the second rule is, you're not supposed to talk about it?”

 

Charles flashed him that impish grin. “Precisely.” 

 

Erik thought about this for a moment. “That probably means you've turned this school into some kind of subtle dictatorship, but don't tell me. I want to be ignorant when the authorities come.”

 

Charles had laughed, one of those terribly appealing laughs that makes him look like a Precious Moments figurine, all blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, and he'd asked, delighted, “If I promise to commit more gross political injustices, do you promise to make more speeches like that?” to which Erik had made a disgusted noise. 

 

And now there's Charles, stupidly compassionate Charles, down at the pitch and getting ready to be slaughtered. 

 

Emma's fingers twitch towards her purse then retreat, and he's surprised because it's so rare for her to make careless and wasted gestures, especially in front of him. He's even more surprised because he can read this gesture, her hunger for a cigarette telegraphing her anxiety. He thinks that if she was anyone else, she'd be compulsively chain-smoking and clawing his arm off with her nails. 

 

Emma tilts her chin towards the opposing team, dressed in burgundy and black. “That's Cain. Number 11,” she says. Her face is impassive except for the press of her mouth that betrays grimness. “Known appropriately as the Juggernaut.” 

 

A sharp whistle signals the start of the game. Erik tries to follow, gives up after about fifteen minutes, and settles for watching the journey of the large grey rugby ball as people toss it backwards. 

 

“ _Lateral_ passing,” Emma corrects him, when Erik mentions it out loud. “If Charles harps about that one more time, I'm going to slip a laxative into his tea.”

 

As far as he can tell, rugby is slow and boring, then hard and fast and confusing, long periods of set up and bursts of action. True to Emma's word, McCoy is an animal on the field, tearing across the pitch at incredible speeds, his red hair practically a blur as he makes a number of impressive and violent tackles. 

 

“McCoy was bullied in junior high,” Emma says, absently. “By a number of people on the opposing team.” 

 

And Charles? This is a different Charles than any that Erik has ever seen, different from the gentle, considerate boy in the room next to Erik's, that boy who sits next to him in labs and across from during chess, that boy who is kind and arrogantly well-meaning and high-minded as hell.

The boy on the pitch is grinning and fiercely alive, sweat and dirt on his face, and Erik doesn't want to analyse the way his gut clenches at the sight of him, at every swift and startling movement. It's bad enough to feel this way, to feel like his body is aching down to its bones, like there are iron filings laced throughout his whole body, pulling him towards some impossible north.

 

It's bad enough to feel this way. It would be a hundred times worse to understand why. 

 

Then Charles gets tackled. 

 

Charles gets tackled and disappears under a gigantic body, Number 8, and more and more people pile on. Erik surges to his feet with the rest of the crowd. Charles' team shouts “Ruck over, ruck over!” while Emma screams (Emma, who never raises her voice above a monotone), “FUCK YOU FUCKING TOM CASSIDY GET THE FUCK OFF OF HIM!” 

 

The ball re-emerges, kicked out by someone's foot. It's not until everybody else disperses and Charles shakily stands up again that Erik realises he's been screaming right alongside Emma. 

 

One of Charles' team mates, Azazel he thinks, claps Charles on the shoulder, and Charles' jersey now has grass and dirt all down the front of it, and his jaw is set and furious, but he's okay. He's okay. 

 

Number 8 is bumping shoulders with Cain Marko, and Marko is - 

 

Marko's _smirking_. 

 

Erik isn't sure what he yells after that, but Emma looks impressed with him, so he assumes it was filled with profanity. 

 

“Why didn't the ref call that?” Erik rants. “8 obviously targeted him!”

 

Emma shakes her head, mouth twisting. “It's vicious, but textbook. He hasn't done anything that's outside out of the bounds of the game. Charles is fast, but he's small for a forward - of course they’re going to try and tackle him.” And then she mutters, “ _Fucking Tom Cassidy_.” She catches Erik’s look and says, darkly, “Cain’s best friend.”  

 

In retrospect, that first tackle is not so bad. 

 

The second is worse. 

 

The third is brutal. 

 

Erik only catches a brief glimpse of the fourth, it happens so fast. 

 

Marko rams into Charles. Charles flies into the air, dives into the pitch. Head first. 

 

And then Charles doesn't move. 

 

The ref's whistle splits the air, the game stops, a medic runs onto the field. Erik runs towards Charles, Emma at his side. 

 

Erik blurts out, “I have first aid training.” 

 

The medic says, “Good. Okay, I’m steadying his head, you hold his feet.” 

 

Charles looks confused and in pain and deeply unhappy, his bottom lip bitten to bleeding, sweat and dirt plastering his hair to his forehead. 

 

“Can you open your eyes? Can you speak?”

 

Charles croaks, “Yes. Yes."  

 

The medic asks Charles more questions while they wait for the ambulance to arrive. And the words  that Erik remembers best, the ones that become lodged somewhere deep inside of him, like a bullet taking up home in his chest instead of ripping its way out, are these: 

 

“I can't feel my legs.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story lives! Thanks for your patience, everyone. I've had this chapter kicking around for a while, tinkering with it off and on, and figured it was time to bite the bullet and just post. There will be either one or two more part of this fic - a chunk of the next part is already written. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed the chapter, and stay golden, Pony-boy! <3


	3. Chapter 3

When Emma comes back bearing cups of terrible hospital coffee from the vending machine, Lehnsherr looks like he's about to tear all the installations out of the hospital walls and/or make the staff put him in restraints. Maybe a muzzle. The rugby coach is talking to a nurse, but if he's not going to pave her way to Charles, he's basically a non-entity. 

 

Emma thinks about dropping the coffee into Lehnsherr's lap just to get him to snap out of it, but then decides she doesn't want to have her face ripped off, and thrusts the coffee at him instead. 

 

Emma is no stranger to rage. She remembers what it feels like to be so helplessly open in her fury. Having sisters like her sisters and a father like her father has taught her a thing or two, though – never let them see you cry, sure, but more importantly, never let them see you bleed. Make them think your flesh is crystal, and that all words and all hurts pass through you like light. 

 

Charles refers to this as her “diamond mode,” where she goes past grief, past anger, past terror, and into a kind of functional shock in which she can still move and talk and actually do things. Charles lectures her that her diamond mode is a Bad Thing, that she should be compassionate to herself before she dives right into problem-solving mode, but Charles is in the ER because he can't feel his legs, so he doesn't, in this case, have a leg to stand on. 

 

Lehnsherr says, “I fucking hate hospitals.” 

 

Emma looks at him, at all the tension bundled up in his arms and legs, the way he's practically vibrating off the chair. “Nobody likes hospitals.”  

 

But she sits down next to him anyway, because she gets it. It's been less than a month since she was holed up in that awful private “clinic,” uselessly smoking cigarette after cigarette, praying for Christian to come out safe and whole and alive. Praying even though she believes in no higher power but her own wits. 

 

And Charles, of course. She believes in Charles.  

 

“What will happen to Marko?” Lensherr asks, in a tone of voice that makes it clear he is imagining the many, many things that he would like to happen to Marko. 

 

“It depends.” Emma’s sent out her feelers, and she’s getting a steady stream of updates from what Charles likes to jokingly-not jokingly call her spy network. On her phone, she has the CV and background information on the referree, a PDF of the rugby union’s disciplinary procedures, cell phone footage from the game, witness statements from the team (courtesy of Azazel, good boy) and from the crowd (courtesy Moira McTaggert, Student Council Secretary, has a hopeless crush on Charles), and a run down on every player from the St. Paul’s rugby team. She’s furious that there isn’t something more tangible to do. 

 

All of this runs like ticker tape in the background of her mind as she says, in vicious monotone to Erik, “There’s a local disciplinary committee. It’s up to them. Marko’s red carded for now, which means he’s suspended from play. But we won’t know anything until they have a hearing.” 

 

“It was physical assault,” Lehsnherr says, his voice shaking with anger. “How could they just-” 

 

“Listen to yourself,” she snaps. “‘Assault.’ It’s not a legal matter, Lehnsherr, get it through your head, it’s fucking sports. The punishment for something like this is always suspension. What did you want to do, beat up Marko in a dark alleyway?” 

 

Lehnsherr opens and then shuts his mouth and Emma marvels. 

 

“Oh my god, you actually wanted to beat him up in a dark alleyway, didn't you? Where would you even find a dark alleyway around here?” 

 

“I don't know!” Lehnsherr barks, looking away, a ridge of colour appearing along his cheeks, and Emma realises, in a moment of nausea, that this is one of those things that Charles would probably find “cute.” 

 

At that moment, a doctor comes out and spouts off something laden with jargon that translates basically to, “They got the swelling down, congratulations: your best friend may not be paralysed for life,” and Emma feels her diamond walls shatter. Just like that, with one small tap. 

 

She wants to hide her face, and she does; she ends up hiding it in Erik's shoulder. Instead of pushing her away or burning his jacket now that she's touched it, Erik permits it. He lets her shake and shake and shake, in dizzying, mind-numbing, bone-melting relief. 

 

“If you tell anyone about this, I'll kill you,” she says, when she's gotten herself under control again. 

 

Erik has the heels of his hands jammed into his eyes, which are suspiciously red-rimmed. “The same to you.” 

 

Years later, she pinpoints this as the day they became friends.  

 

~

 

The fact that Charles is not paralysed for life does not mean that things aren't shitty and horrible. 

 

When Emma and Erik are finally allowed to see him, he’s in a hospital bed. His head is shaved and he has two spectacularly blooming black eyes. 

 

Emma kneels by him and gets as close to flinging her arms around him as Emma ever does, and Charles' face eases and softens and he places a hand on her blonde head, and it's like they are a picture, drawn softly in oils and far away, enclosed in a frame, and Erik can only stare at them. He doesn't know how the parameters of their friendship got written, how Emma can touch Charles unthinkingly while maintaining a steely physical distance from anyone else. He doesn't know how Charles can reach out to her and, even though he is easy and affectionate with everyone he comes into contact with, still make it clear that this touch is unique. 

 

Charles closes his eyes, shudders out a breath, and Erik wants to gut Cain Marko all over again. 

 

Then Charles looks over Emma's head and his eyes lock with Erik's, and the world makes no sense at all: Charles is the injured one, but it's Erik who feels tender and bruised all over. 

 

“Thank you,” Charles says. His speech is slow and drowsy from the concussion or painkillers or both, his syllables enunciated over-carefully, but he’s still Charles. “Thank you both.”  

 

And it wrenches at Erik, how Charles can be so guileless and so god damn gallant and say things like that, things that it would be impossible for Erik to say, that would catch in his throat like barbed wire.

 

“It's nothing,” Erik mutters to his feet. 

  
“You’re such an idiot,” Emma says to Charles, muffled. Erik knows that he can be deliberately obtuse about feelings, but even he can hear that Emma is really saying, _I love you_. 

 

~

 

Erik sleeps restlessly, and around two in the morning, he hears noises from next door, from Charles' room. He listens, heart beating hard for a few minutes, before he shakes himself, pulls on a hoodie, and shuffles over to knock on the door. There's silence on the other end. Erik knocks again, and then when it's still silent, he opens the door, to find – of course – Emma Frost. 

 

She's sitting cross-legged on Charles' bed, watching TV on his laptop. She's wearing lace shorts and one of Charles' shirts again and her hair is pulled away from her face with a headband, earbuds connecting to the laptop. Her face looks different without make up, younger and paler and less defined, almost ghostly. One of her hands is buried in a bag of sour cream and onion chips. 

 

She hits the space bar, and takes an ear bud out. 

 

“Yes?” 

 

There's no trace of apology in her voice, no embarrassment, and she's looking at him steadily. Not with the same look she'd daggered at him what feels like ages ago, when they were strangers. No, she looks at him with a complete lack of surprise, like she was expecting him sooner, like he had really taken his sweet time. 

 

Something in him gives way. 

 

“What are you watching?” he asks, sitting cross-legged on the floor, propping his back against Charles' bed. 

 

She doesn't answer, but gets up and rummages around in one of Charles' desk drawers, and plugs in another set of headphones. She perches the laptop on Charles' desk chair so Erik can see too, and settles back on the bed. 

 

“I wanted to watch gay porn on Charles' Netflix account and then take a video of his reaction when he sees his Suggested for You List,” she says. “But the internet is being horrendously slow, so I'm just watching Look Around You. Charles has every episode downloaded.” 

 

She hits the space bar again, and the narrator says, “What is water? It's a difficult question, because water is impossible to describe. One might ask the same about birds. What are birds? We just don't know...” 

 

At some point, she passes him down the bag of chips. He takes a fistful.

 

“Scotch?” Emma asks. She has a glass propped up on a textbook so it won't spill in bed. 

 

It's two in the morning, and Charles is in the hospital with a spinal cord injury. _I can't feel my legs._ “What the hell. Sure.”

 

Emma  putters around Charles' room as if she actually lives there, taking out a tumbler, ice cubes from Charles' mini fridge, and a flask from inside of a book. Of course. 

 

“It's Shakespeare,” she says, when she catches him looking. “I suggested _On the Origin on Species_ , and Charles was horrified.” 

 

He scoffs when Emma offers to water down his drink, so he sips his Scotch slowly, feeling it burn smooth and clean as it goes down. After three or four episodes of Look Around You and just as many fingers of Scotch, Erik is lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling and Emma's not even pretending to watch anymore. Their headphones have popped out from the laptop, and Look Around You's eighties theme song, rife with synthesizers, washes over them from Charles' tinny laptop speakers. 

 

Erik feels so pleasantly loose and warm and distant from things. The alcohol unmoors his mouth from his brain, and he hears himself ask Emma, “So what's the deal with you and Charles anyway? Are you dating, or what?”

 

Emma snorts. “If I had a dollar,” she says. Then she says to Erik, sounding as cross and proud as a huffy first grader, “Charles is my _best_ friend.” 

 

“Which still doesn't answer the question.”

 

“You're not asking the right question.” Emma reaches down and stabs Erik in the shoulder with one manicured finger. “My turn, now. What's the deal with you and Charles?” 

 

Erik is going to blame it on the Scotches and sleeplessness that his first response is not to say He means nothing to me, but to say, “I have no fucking clue.” 

 

Charles steps into his personal space and his head and smiles at him the way no one else smiles at him and is unforgivably arrogant and endlessly aggravating in his kindness and always refers to Erik as "my friend" and they have long, heated arguments about the civil rights movement and history and politics and social justice that make Erik want to push him into a lake and then rescue him. He looks forward to seeing Charles every day and dreads seeing Charles every day, in equal, seesawing measure. Charles is the worst. And the best. 

 

Emma says, “God, that’s disgusting. You really have it bad.” 

 

A horrible, sinking part of Erik thinks that he might have ranted all of that out loud. 

 

“Yes,” Emma says. “You did. That part too. God, you really can’t handle your liquor, can you?” 

 

~

 

Emma's alarm goes off at six as usual. She wakes up, throat parched, and it takes her a moment, in the near-darkness, to realise that she's in Charles' bed, but without Charles. 

 

Then it slams into her: Cain Marko, the tackle, the wheelchair, Charles' bruised eyes. 

 

She's just put a foot on the floor when she sees Erik Lehnsherr, on the floor with a pillow, curled up in a grey hoodie and sweatpants. There's stubble on his face and his mouth is all tensed up, even in sleep. 

 

She remembers, with the far away clarity of the newly sober, the weird, meandering conversation they'd had last night, how unaccountably adorable Erik had been, somehow both glowering and yearning (a combination she hasn't seen in anyone else) as he rambled about Charles. She'd never seen anyone so resistant to falling in like, and wonders how long and how terrible this shit show is going to be, and whether or not she should be doing something about it, like changing the channel. 

 

Just as she's getting a bottle of water out of Charles' mini-fridge, Erik wakes up, groggy and confused. 

 

“Take the bed,” she tells him. “Sleep. You look atrocious.” 

 

He stands up long enough just to collapse on the bed with a groan. Almost as an after-thought, she gets another bottle of water for him, and the Advil from Charle's right-hand desk drawer. Charles keeps them there for when he gets racked with migraines while studying or sitting at the computer too long,  and she feels overwhelmed, blindsided for a moment, to know that she knows another person this well.

 

“You might actually be a human being,” Erik says, non sequitur, squinting at her, before he drops off back to sleep, dead to the world. 

 

~  

 

He wakes up from a dream about being on the deck of the HMS Beagle with Charles, his face half-buried in an old grey cardigan that Charles’ had discarded at bedtime and forgotten about. 

 

He feels like setting himself on fire. 

 

~

 

She spots Erik a few hours later at lunchtime, staring at a cup of steaming black coffee and a small pile of whole wheat toast. He looks like he wants to die, which makes Emma feel a million times better in comparison. After a shower, fresh clothes, and make up, she feels much more cheerful, in a bloodthirsty sort of way. 

 

“Morning,” she says, seating herself across from Erik, who drags his eyes from his plate to her. She steadfastly refuses to characterize any morning as “good.” 

 

Erik makes a kind of muffled, wounded noise in his throat, what Emma would describe as a whuffle, and glares at her accusingly. “You're a she-demon,” he says. “You're the worst.”

 

“Was that your first time getting drunk?” Emma asks, fascinated. “Did I pop your drinking cherry?” 

 

She'd been eleven, the first time she and Charles snagged his mother's flask from her purse, knowing she would just blame herself if she found it empty, and took turns drinking warm gin from it and gagging until they both threw up beneath some bushes in the ornamental rose garden. Charles had felt terrifically guilty about it after and confessed in tears to the chief of maintenance, who had just patted him on the head and promised not to tell anyone. 

 

“I hate you,” Erik says to Emma. “Die in a fire.”

 

“I'll take that as a yes.”

 

Hungover, dishevelled Erik is a vast improvement over stiff, bristly Erik who sneers as he parades his salt of the earth superiority around the school, not hiding his distaste for her or for the staff or any other students – except for Charles, of course. It's much easier to get along with him when he's wincing at the sunlight coming in through the dining hall windows. Maybe that's just because Emma is not so secretly a sadist and feels calmest and most serene when others are writhing in pain. 

 

“I'd skip the coffee if I were you,” she says, deciding to be merciful. “It'll only make your headache worse. No OJ, either. Stick to water.” 

 

He makes a face at his coffee, and shoves it to the side. _She'd_ had a glass of water before bed, because she wasn't a complete moron. 

 

Erik opens his mouth – closes it again – and she is fascinated all over again by the spectacle of Erik Lehnsherr being _uncomfortable_. She'd never really seen him discomfited, no matter how Charles teased him. Erik always just rolled his eyes, hunched his shoulders, and replied with something caustic that would just leave Charles in peals of laughter instead of wanting to punch him in the dick, like any sane human being. 

 

Erik finally asks, “Are you going to visit Charles again?”

 

She lets him squirm for another few moments while he waits for her answer, curious to see which part of him will win out – the part of him that's dying to visit Charles, or the part of him that wants _not_ to be dying to see Charles. Her heart clenches every time she thinks of Charles being hurt, it makes her feel eviscerated and left wide open, but this. Is still kind of funny. 

 

“Yes,” Emma says, finally.  

 

“Can I - ” Erik stops, frustrated. “I would like to visit Charles as well,” he says, stiff and overly-formal as if he is a gentleman caller asking if he can court her daughter, which is an apt metaphor, really. 

 

Emma takes a moment to look at him, to consider him. He's got a face that's probably a little too intense for most people, all eyes and jaw, the kind of face you either want to stare at for hours or look away from within seconds, but it's still young and unmoulded. 

 

One day, she wants to take him to her tailor's. She imagines that he could wear suits with authority and masculine grace, that he could wear linen and look good in it, that he could become chiseled, statue-like, confident and terrifying with a shark-bright grin. She sees the core of it, of his potential: the determination, the strength of his convictions, the doggedness, the sheer force of will. She knows that she could hone him, diamond and titanium.  

 

She also knows this, the way she knows when the storm cloud of her father's temper is on the horizon, the way she knows that Charles will never give up on a lost cause: no matter what Erik does, even if he lives the quietest of lives in a town no one's heard of as a goddamn lumberjack, he is going to make his mark on the world. In five or ten or fifteen years, she wants to be there to see what he's become. When he'll terrify all the Frosts and Xaviers and Markos of the world. 

 

But he isn't that yet. Right now, he just stonewalls people and hunches in on himself and glowers in an imitation of a gargoyle, a huge FUCK OFF sign practically emblazoned on his forehead. He’s just young and stupid with his heart bleeding out the front of his t-shirt, no matter how much he tries to scoop it up back into his rib cage. 

 

“I'll call a cab at two,” she says. “You're paying this time.” 

 

“We’ll take the bus,” he snaps. 

 

She sighs mentally, and readjusts her estimate for how long it'll take him to become a man who is actually worthy of Charles. 

 

~

 

Charles is sleeping when they come in, so Erik just sort of lurks by the door, hesitant to come in. 

 

Emma folds herself into the chair next to his hospital bed, and the sunlight from the open window slants across her, and she is looking, just looking at Charles, staring calmly at him. Her face is unchanged, back to its default blank slate, but the hair on the back of Erik's neck rises, because the way she looks at Charles still feels as intimate as fingers stroking a face. 

 

She has the right to do that, she can look at Charles Fucking Xavier without her heart exploding in her chest. 

 

She doesn't seem to notice Erik’s quite panic attack. Or she's ignoring him. The latter's more likely.  

 

She starts pulling things out of her purse and putting them on the wheeled table next to his bed – a thermos of tea, a package of chocolate shortbread cookies, a book. Cool as anything, she opens it up, and starts to read out loud. It’s that rainbow and diversity book that Charles was reading the first time he ever sat down to breakfast with Erik, that time that he left Erik speechless with how open he was, how unapologetic, how he could so clearly not give a damn what anybody thought of him. 

 

Erik leans against the door, listening. Her movements and her reading voice are smooth and deft and strangely familiar. 

 

“You've done this before,” he says, not really processing it until he says it. 

 

“Yes,” Emma says, “yes, I've done this before,” and her voice isn't a perfect monotone. Isn't remotely robotic.

 

“Cain,” he says. Remembers the way that Charles had said it, all sorts of strange emotions folding in and around that word. And he also remembers the weird tension that came into Emma and Charles when they mentioned Cain, remembers how he had tried forcefully to ignore it, to not care about it, to tell himself, _“No love lost.”_ As if Cain had just - beat Charles at polo, or something. 

 

“Cain,” Emma repeats. “And Kurt.” She is being careful, right now, and Erik is so focused on her that he swears he can see her being careful, the clockwork movements behind her mask. “There are things I can't say,” she says, finally. “You'll have to ask Charles yourself.” Her mouth quirks in a not-smile. “Before you murder Cain.”

 

“Who says they'll catch me,” and it sounds so utterly reasonable coming from his own mouth. 

 

Emma bares her teeth in a different kind of not-smile. “Not with my resources, they won't.” 

 

And Erik remembers what he had thought last night, or this morning: beneath her fembot veneer, Emma Frost may actually be a human.  

 

~

 

In between the drugs and the... the drugs, Charles drifts in and out of consciousness, aware and yet not aware of the people bobbing in and out of his room.  The EMTs are bloodless and efficient and the doctor was funny and kind, with a stuffed frog clipped to his stethoscope as if he’d come from a children’s ward. 

 

And of course, there are Erik and Emma. They’re in his room right now and he struggles to wake up fully instead of being caught in the deep, heavy daze. Erik and Emma are, for once, united in their anxiety for him. When he had wished for them to get along, he hadn't imagined his own spinal injury as a catalyst. 

 

There's that word. _Spinal injury._ When he starts to think about it, something curiously like hysteria bubbles up in his throat, so he swallows it down. He's heard his own story repeated on the lips of so many medical professionals talking over his semi-conscious head, and it's odd to be spoken of as a thing, not a person, not consulted for his own story even when he’s right there in the room, but that's not the worst of it. The worst is knowing how utterly stupid he'd been. 

 

Unforgivably stupid. So careless. He should've known better than to get cocky in the field with Cain, to think he had taken enough precautions, to think that Cain knew better than to start something with so many eyewitnesses. He had been relying for too long on the security of his knowledge that it had been years since Cain had physically harmed him, that things were different between them now that they were older.

 

So. Charles had been stupid, too mind-bogglingly stupid, to pay attention and update his information. And when Charles was stupid, he got hurt. And when he was hurt, the people close to him suffered. 

 

From far away, he can hear Emma and Erik talking, and the syllables are as meaningless as birdsong. He will never forget the Emma's crushing strength as she hugged him or the brief, stricken look on Erik's face before he smoothed that distress away. It was bittersweet, in a way, to learn in this way that Erik cared for him, at least as friends. 

 

The pain is weirdly diffused throughout all of his limbs, as if his body is just a cup that pain has been poured into, filling up every available space. He feels trapped in his body and in this bed, the IV lock aching sharply in the back of his left hand, the wires from the monitoring devices snaking about him, binding him. The light hurts his eyes and he still feels constantly at the edge of but not quite throwing up.

 

Really, he should be grateful he can move at all. Grateful that he can feel _pain_ at all. And if he can’t feel it in his legs at the moment, at least that will come back. So the doctors have said. 

 

And that knowledge hurts too, sits heavy inside his chest. It could have been so much worse. It could have been so much worse, and all because Charles made the simple, near-fatal mistake of underestimating Cain.

 

He shuts his eyes tightly, but the tears are still there, stinging. Beneath the physical pain, deep at the core of everything, is the worse pain of humiliation. He can still sense Erik nearby and he feels raw all over, wishing he could curl up into himself and hide, hide, hide. 

 

Emma is different; she's been a part of his life for such a long time that they've seen the ugliest parts of each other, so that it is less humiliating, but - 

 

Erik. He feels horribly naked, knowing that Erik sees him like this, weak and stupid and small and bald, when he was smart enough to have avoided this whole mess, he had the IQ points to prove it, and yet he had allowed it all to happen anyway - 

 

Then he feels a hand brush against his. 

 

Calloused from writing, careful, dry, the fingers too long and the palm too large to be Emma's. 

 

Unexpectedly warm. 

 

Suddenly, everything is all right with the world. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, why the hell not, it's been a long while - you get two chapters for the price of one. One more part to go!
> 
> Also, Look Around You: DON'T LOOK UP IT ON WIKI YOU WILL RUIN IT FOR YOURSELF. Just watch the first episode and soak it in: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBaVwwuErmU]().


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